Three things:

-1) Viewed on the wall-mounted plasma-babies in the exercise-gym at the vaunted Canandaigua YMCA:

Daddy is sitting anxiously at the dining-room table, surrounded by disheveled papers, chewing nervously on his pencil, working on income-tax.
Comely wife leans in from the kitchen: “How’s it goin’, honey?”
“I’m stuck. Stumped.”
“Well, maybe you oughta call somebody.”
“Can’t,” he says. “All we got is this box.”
He holds up the box the fabulous TubbieTax® software came in.
Wife comes in, takes the box, holds one end to an ear, and puts the other end to her mouth.
“Hellooooo,” she says. “Anybody home?”
At H&R Block you interface with a real person, not a box.

-2) We think the world of our cellphones.
They’re Motorola RAZRs, with big numbers and a display you can read in daylight.
You can even hear ‘em. I.e. ya don’t have to turn on the speakerphone in a parking-lot.
But they also have these buttons on the side of the case you can inadvertently hit when putting it away.
One turns the ringer off, and vibrator on; or everything off.
Well, that’s just great.
Hit that button by mistake, and ya gotta reset everything with the “tools.”
Otherwise the bluster-boy might go ballistical because my cellphone didn’t ring.
Okay, so be very careful putting the thing away.
Don’t grab it by the case.
“Be-boop!”
“Uh-ohhhhhh......... Unpardonable sin.”
“Gotta reset it again.”
Maybe them buttons should be somewhere other than the edge of the case. Who designed these things? An engineer?

-3) “Please hold during the silence......... Boom-chicka-boom-chicka-boom-chicka-boom-chicka!”
I had to make two phonecalls today (Tuesday, January 15, 2008): -a) the mighty Mezz to see if Randi Willard was still our newspaper carrier, and -b) Preferred Care; our new medical insurer (in place of Blue Cross), to see -1) if they had my Primary-Care-Provider (Bloomfield Famblee Practice — my doctor), and -2) if the things we received in the mail were our insurance-cards (they appear to be).
Both phonecalls went nowhere.
“All our representatives are busy with other customers,” said the mighty Mezz; “so please leave a message and we’ll get back to you.”
I did and they did.
Preferred Care was another story. I was warned by my wife: “expect to get put on hold for 89 bazilyun hours.”
“All our Customer-Service representatives are busy with other customers....... We value your call.”
(Yeah; so much ya won’t hire another Customer-Service rep.)
I went through four hold-cycles. “Thank ya for holding. We value your call. Please continue holding, and your call will be answered in the order it was received.”
After four holds I gave up. I got things to do!
This is kinna why I shop Weggers insteada Tops. Tops might have one checkout open out of 15, with 89 bazilyun people waiting in line. Danny (Wegman) hired enough people to open 89 bazilyun checkouts, so people (like me) preferred shopping there — i.e. not waiting in line was worth a 20% price penalty.

All wide-screen flat-screen high-definition TVs are called “plasma-babies” by my all-knowing, blowhard brother-in-Boston. Some are a different technology, but that makes no difference to an all-knowing blowhard.

A gigantic and noisy argument has begun in our famblee about TurboTax®. This is because all my siblings use it, but I don’t — making me utterly reprehensible and above-all stupid. I already have an Excel spreadsheet that gives me all the Schedule-A totals, so that I can do my taxes in about an hour. I tried TurboTax® two years ago, but gave up after already wasting four hours, and then it wanted me to individualize each charity-gift, whereas Schedule-A wants a grand total (what my spreadsheet gives me). La-dee-dah; enter everything in TurboTax® or a 1040 pdf. WHATEVER; you’re doing the same thing in each case, except TurboTax® would turn a one-hour process into 5-6 hours.

“The bluster-boy” is my all-knowing, blowhard brother-in-Boston, who noisily badmouths everything I do or say. He says my ability with cellphones is behind-the-times.

RE: “Who designed these things? An engineer?” —My loudmouthed macho brother-from-Boston was trained as an engineer, and noisily claims superiority. I majored in History, so am therefore vastly inferior.

The “mighty Mezz” is the Canandaigua Daily-Messenger newspaper, from where I retired two years ago. Best job I ever had.

My wife of 40 years is “Linda.”

“Weggers” is Wegmans, a large supermarket-chain based in Rochester we often buy groceries at. They have a store in Canandaigua. “Tops” Markets, another large chain based in Buffalo, also has a supermarket in Canandaigua. I shop Wegmans all the time; I’ve shopped Tops once. Wegmans usually costs more, but I know the store.